Song lists for schnookums

Ok, this is one of those memes that I honestly don't get, but since Chandra seems to enjoy doing it and she's doing a fair amount of hand-editing I thought I'd play along and try to offer a quicker method. Here's the list from my laptop:

1. "Love Vibration" by Josh Rouse, from 1972
2. "Verandi" by Björk
3. "Fuzzkey" by Jason Orrill, from Lap on the Loveseat
4. "South" by Prince, from N.E.W.S
5. "Root Down Reprise" by dj BC and The Beastles, from The Beastles
6. "Find the Beat" by Jason Orrill, from Lap on the Loveseat
7. "Helped Us Sleep" by West Dakota, from West Dakota
8. "Hold It Together Now" by dj BC and the Beastles, from The Beastles
9. "New Obsession" by Silent League
10. "Ditshe Tshiekutala" by Orchestre Tout Puissant Likembe Konono No 1 De Mingiedi, from Lubuaku
11. "My Friends Have" by Marianne Faithfull, from Before the Poison

My Powerbook isn't my main music computer, so the list is not really representative of my collection as a whole. It tends to be populated with stuff I find online more than anything.

Anyway, on to the technique for doing less typing. Copy your song list from iTunes and paste it into a text editor that knows grep. I use BBEdit, but TextWrangler would work as well. Then, do a find & replace with the following strings:

Search string:

(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)$

Replace string:

<li>"\1" by \3, from <i>\4</i></li>

If you have a different number or order of columns showing in iTunes the pattern may be slightly different, but the adjustments should be pretty easy to figure out. You'll need to add the ordered list tags at the start and end, but the bulk of the work should be done for you.

Posted by Jason at March 5, 2005 08:46 AM